Cokie Roberts

At NPR she previously served as the congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News, providing analysis for all network news programming.

From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program This Week. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting.

In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by Universal Uclick. The Roberts also wrote From this Day Forward, an account of their more than 40-year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto The New York Times bestseller list, following Roberts' number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, an account of women's roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts histories of women in America's founding era — Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008, also became instant bestsellers. Her most recent book, Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868, was published in 2015.

Cokie Roberts holds more than twenty honorary degrees, serves on the boards of several non-profit institutions and on the President's Commission on Service and Civic Participation. The Library of Congress named her a "Living Legend," one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor. She is the mother of two and grandmother of six.

And this is the day of the week when we normally talk to our MORNING EDITION contributor Cokie Roberts about politics. This morning, though, politics and the runup to the president's State of the Union Address tomorrow have been overshadowed by the news out of Rome.

So we've asked Cokie, a longtime Vatican watcher, to weigh in on the announcement that Pope Benedict is resigning at the end of this month.

President Obama goes before a joint session of Congress tomorrow evening to deliver his State of the Union message. White House briefers say the president plans to bring the national conversation back to the economy, after weeks of focusing on immigration and gun violence.

Here for more insight is Cokie Roberts, who joins us most Mondays. Good morning.

Now that the Democratic convention is over, polls show President Obama pulling ahead of Mitt Romney, not by so much, but the change did show up in several surveys. Let's talk about that and more with Cokie Roberts, who joins us most Mondays.